Make It Good
by Miz Thang
Summary: Draco gets just the reply he wants from Pansy and Pansy makes sure Draco knows where her loyalties lie. Sequel to Any Way She Has To.


**Title: **Make It Good  
**Author:** Miz Thang  
**Characters/Pairing: **Draco Malfoy, mention of DM/PP  
**Rating:** FRT  
**Word Count: **941  
**Warnings:** There are none, actually.  
**Disclaimer:** I don't own anything but the little story's idea. Everything else belongs to who it belongs to.  
**Summary:** Draco gets just the reply he wants from Pansy and Pansy makes sure Draco knows where her loyalties lie. For 30hath's January 4th-make it good.

It's simple when you think about it fleetingly. You somehow manage to get a group of Death Eaters past the very strong school wards without anyone noticing a disturbance and somehow keep Potter out of the way long enough to kill that mudblood lover Dumbledore.

_When you think about it fleetingly, it's easy._

Ironically, that doesn't mean a damn thing when you agonize over the task you fail to do. He managed the first half, didn't he? In came the masked killers, right under Dumbledore's nose, when the Dark Lord was almost sure he'd fail?

It doesn't hit him how utterly bad his failure is until he's running from the school with Snape and ducking hexes from his former classmates. He hadn't killed Dumbledore. He hadn't even come close. He'd lowered his wand, took the time to think that maybe for a second Dumbledore was right and he wasn't a killer. And he failed, because Snape had the glory of killing Dumbledore.

_Aunt Bellatrix always did call him half blood trash.__  
_  
Fortunately for Draco and his mother, Voldemort's more obsessive with the mere fact that Dumbledore is dead, rather than who killed him, and with the combined efforts of his aunt and Snape, they convince Voldemort to give Draco one more chance.

_One more chance is all he needs._

The Dark Mark really burns when it's given, Draco finds out the next night (but he didn't scream; there was no way he'd let himself scream). His mother is more than a bit obviously angry with the thought that her son is now a Death Eater and, as if in some way to appease her needs to out rightly disobey the will of the Dark Lord, she starts to spend all her time at the Parkinson's home. More time than she's spent in the past decade.

_Draco wonders if the two middle-aged women planned a wedding that would most likely never happen._

His mother's visits bring his next thought. The Dark Mark still hurts days after when he's sitting in his room late at night and pens out a message to Pansy Parkinson. He sends it by the owl he's familiarized her with asking her to make the choice for her family, to make the right, smarter,_ better_ choice. And he sits. And he waits.

Later, his mother tells him that Pansy Parkinson "has really flourished" and "is a more lady-like girl with each passing day." Draco thinks about that and wonders if his mother is attempting to use Pansy in some way that will be time consuming for him and keep him away from the Death Eater things (not that it's really an option now that he has the mark on his arm; Aunt Bella attempted to explain that to his mother).

Pansy responds to his owl with a few simple words and he almost smiles when he sees her response. Four simple words. _Just tell me when_.

He tells his aunt, who in turns brings the good news to Voldemort. He is pleased of Draco's recruitment and Draco realizes that he quite likes being on the Dark Lord's good side. One day, he imagines, he will be Voldemort's right hand man, and when Harry Potter keels over, Draco will have anything he wants because he will be the best, the only one Voldemort can trust…and maybe Pansy…

He sends Pansy another message, telling her when she should reread the letter (it's a port key disguised as a note) and he's sure Pansy is smart enough to get his meaning. She should be if his father even considered pairing his son with her.

He's reassured at the midnight Death Eater meeting where she appears out of thin air. She looks stunned only for the barest moment before what seems to be cool calm settle on her face. Draco notices it for what it is.

_Grim determination._

Aunt Bellatrix presents her to the Dark Lord and stands just beside her as Voldemort casts the Dark Mark onto her arm. It's imprinted on her flesh, dark to her own somewhat pale whiteness (not nearly as close to his though, he guesses).

Draco's always had doubts about how he should feel in regards to Pansy. He took her to the Yule Ball at his father insistence because of those doubts. He always wondered if she was the one he should be with forever, if she deserved the honor his parents thought she did of bearing his last name.

His mother has always told him that one day…one day he'll just be sitting somewhere and that the girl (he figures she meant Pansy) would do something that would seem so minimal and he'd fall in love instantly because that was the insane way love worked. At the time, Draco had thought his mother was sprouting absolute dung.

She smiles a bit, Pansy, even though she's sure that the mark burns her skin like hell and she feels as if her arm is about to fall off. She keeps her mouth titled upwards, even as she bows and comes to stand besides him, holding her arm close to her body on reflex.

_But she still smiles_.

Later, when everyone else has left and he's invited her to Malfoy Manor to celebrate, she leans forward, not yet drunk but somewhere in between, and says, "The dark mark holds no value to me, Draco."

He looks at her as if she's said something stupid; doesn't she know his home is crawling with Death Eaters?

"Pansy-"

"My only obligation in all of this is to you." She smiles a bit, that same smile she gave Voldemort. "Make it good."

_-continued in Just Tell Me When._


End file.
